Only the common cold outranks Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) as a cause of absenteeism from work. Thirty percent of individuals suffering from IBS miss at least one day of work per month on average. However, there is no medication on the market today that is an effective treatment for IBS.
Although IBS includes a variety of specific symptoms, there is no direct test that will determine whether someone has the condition. Normally, a variety of tests are performed to rule out other diseases. For example, a colonoscopy is frequently performed to rule out inflammatory bowel disease and testing for lactose intolerance also is performed.
Stress and other psychological considerations have been found to exacerbate the symptoms of those who suffer from IBS. This has led some physicians to treat IBS as a purely psychosomatic disorder and to look for an underlying psychiatric disorder. As a result, many physicians look for an additional psychiatric disorder to treat. For example, some of those who have IBS also have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and/or general anxiety disorder (GAD), a social phobia including agoraphobia or depression. This has led some physicians to believe that IBS is a result of the psychiatric disorder and that treating the psychiatric disorder also will cure the IBS. However, this is clearly an erroneous contention considering that only about one-half of those with IBS also have a psychiatric disorder.
Although IBS is clearly an independent condition, the fact that its symptoms are magnified by psychiatric factors leads doctors to still treat IBS as part of a psychiatric disorder. Considering that the overwhelming majority of those who seek treatment for IBS symptoms do have a psychiatric disorder in addition to the IBS, the psychiatric medical treatment is not unreasonable. However, some physicians have suggested that even when IBS patients do not have a psychiatric disorder, treatment with psychiatric medications is an acceptable practice. They have based this theory on the fact that administration of drugs such as anti-depressants and psychotropic agents to those with IBS without psychiatric disorder have experienced an improvement in symptoms. However, as mentioned above, this reduction in symptoms is from the treatment of the aggravating factors, such as stress, but is not the result of directly treating IBS. Furthermore, many psychiatric medications have undesirable side effects.
Therefore, there is a need for a treatment for those suffering from IBS. Desirably, the medication will not have the unfavorable side effects associated with many psychiatric medications. Most desirably, the treatment will have positive side effects, such as reducing the patient's level of bad cholesterol.